by David Poyer
“Where’s the Major?” Fierros yelled.
“Dead,” Teddy yelled back. “He took one in the head. Sorry.”
Obie didn’t like having to leave Trinh. It was part of the creed. Never leave your buddy, dead, wounded, or alive. Okay, strictly speaking the Viet wasn’t a Team guy. But they’d trekked a long way together. Been through a shitload of hurt.
Anyhow, it didn’t seem like he’d have to worry about it much longer. He rolled behind a wheel—the steel in wheels and axles was effective cover—and fired slowly and deliberately, aiming carefully each time. But the truck kept rumbling forward. He put several shots into the windshield, but doubted any of the light bullets made it through that armored glass.
The snarl of other motors behind them jerked his head around. The pickups, flags fluttering, had completed their circuit of the square. The oncoming grilles were smeared with blood and melon pulp. Lean sinewy men with black scarves over their faces braced Kalashnikovs on their hips, firing toward the riot troops. Wildly, without aiming. Though the way the truck bucked and skidded meant they wouldn’t have put many bullets into their enemies anyway. Teddy locked gazes with the lead driver, whose scarf was pulled down. Swarthy, black-bearded, his eyes were blasted wide with either drugs or excitement or both as he steered with his right hand and fired a pistol out the window with his left.
A second later the fighters in back grabbed for handholds as the pickup braked, skidded sideways, and rocked crazily to a halt. The driver leaned out and beckoned angrily with the pistol. He had a white streak in his black mustache. Teddy gaped. Then, suddenly, understood.
“Lay down some fire, goddamn it!” he yelled at Fierros. He stood, leveled the rifle, and blasted out the rest of his magazine, walking the crosshairs across the sparkling of muzzle flashes that faced them. The noise was terrific. Every rifle in the square seemed to be on full auto, and a gray smoke eddied over the corpses. His own shots were underlain by a prolonged clatter from the AKs in the truck. When his bolt clicked back empty he burst from behind the van, limping as fast as he could while bullets cracked and snapped around him, nipping at his goatskins. Hands reached down from the pickup. He grunted painfully as he was hauled upward, tumbled over the side, and thrown into the bed like a sack of oats, onto hundreds of spent cartridges, his rifle clutched to his chest. “Ragger,” he shouted hoarsely. “Ragger! Come on!”
He lay looking up as the pickup jolted forward, bullets clunk-clunk-clunking into the sides; as lean, bearded, hostile young faces stared down at him; as the black flags, hand-daubed with what he saw now were verses from the Koran, snapped furiously above them. He rolled up to his knees, pumping the empty rifle over his head. “Allahu akbar!” he yelled, grinning as fiercely as they, and they shouted it in return, gesticulating, cursing, firing raggedly back at their enemies as the truck accelerated away, bullets crackling overhead.
19
The East China Sea
“MISSILE eighteen away … nineteen away…”
At the strike console, Lieutenant Singhe was announcing each Tomahawk’s departure with the grim satisfaction of a professional executioner.
In Combat, again, still. The dampers had been closed for half an hour now, but the nitrogenous bitterness of solid-fuel boosters still seeped in. Air-conditioning had been secured during the launch, and the temperature was climbing.
Dan rubbed his face. Eighteen hours in the saddle. A little while ago he’d been weary unto death. But the tablets the chief corpsman had brought up were doing the job. He felt reenergized, spun up, as if he’d downed eighteen cups of coffee, one after another.
“Twenty away.” Eleven seconds … “Missile twenty-one, away—”
A weird jubilation kept threatening, a euphoria he had to keep tamping down. He’d doubted they’d reach their launch point. Now they were here, a bare hundred miles off Shanghai, and with each minute Task Force 76’s magazines were emptying. American Tomahawks. Korean Hyunmoo-III land attack rounds. Blazing light blanked the cameras. Cottony smoke billowed in monitors. Flaming stars lofted, shed boosters, steadied on their courses, and dwindled, trailing a bourbon haze. Toward radar sites, comm and command nodes, antiaircraft batteries, airfields, ammunition dumps.
One look at Cheryl Staurulakis sobered him. Drawn tight, with purple stains under her eyes, she stared with red-rimmed but dry eyes up at the displays.
When he’d given her the news the night before, in the cramped ruby-lit navigation space behind Savo’s pilothouse, she’d squinted up for several seconds before turning away.
“Did you understand what I said, Cheryl?”
“I do understand, Admiral. Thanks for telling me personally.”
He’d scratched his chin, unsure how to proceed. Finally decided to offer a smidgen of hope. “They don’t give any details about his loss. There’s still a possibility he ejected.”
“Then they’d carry him as MIA, wouldn’t they?”
He’d spread his hands. “I … probably, but…”
When she’d swung back, there in the tight little space walled with ticking instruments and blue-backed H.O. pubs, her blue eyes were blazing. “They just threw them into those cockpits, Dan. That was his fourth time ever in an F-35.”
“I didn’t know—”
“They cut the training cycle to a week. Stuck them in a new aircraft and said, ‘Go take on the whole Chinese air force.’” She picked up a clothbound ledger. Her hands shook; in the red light the irritated patches on her skin looked black. She stared at the book as if contemplating throwing it across the space, or perhaps at him. Then, after a few seconds, set it aside.
“I’m sorry, Cheryl. I wish we didn’t have to lose people. Especially guys like Eddie. If you want to—need some time off, Fred can take over your chair. Or Bart—”
She didn’t meet his gaze. “We’re going to take more attacks. Enzweiler doesn’t know the combat system. Bart’s dependable, but he doesn’t think fast. I need to be on deck.”
He hesitated, unsure again what to do, to say. Words seemed so inadequate. At last he stepped forward and took her in his arms. She braced against his chest, tensely as a torqued-tight wire rope. Her arms were folded, hugging not him, but herself.
“I’ve got to take care of the ship,” she muttered. “Got to forget this. Until later.”
Now she sat beside him at the command table, eyes still dry, moving only occasionally to keyboard a command or murmur into a circuit.
“Round twenty-four away … rounds complete,” Amy Singhe sang out. Why the fuck did she sound so triumphant?
“Secure from strike stations,” Staurulakis said into her throat mike. “Admiral, strike package complete. Returning from Strike Condition to Condition One ABM at this time.”
“Very well.” Dan blew out as the displays winked and changed, the rightmost screen turning amber.
Operation Recoil had begun. Seven other ships and submarines had launched waves of stealth-modified Tomahawks as well. EW reported heavy jamming and spoofing. The SPY-1 picture, linked with radars from Kristensen, McClung, Hampton Roads, Sejong, Zembiec, and the reconnaissance drones that patrolled fifty miles out from the task force, occasionally blurred, froze, stalled. But then regenerated as the Aegis team hunched over their consoles, communicating in low curses. Trying to ignore the glitching, Dan kept his attention on the coast.
They’d stirred up the hornet’s nest, all right. A hundred miles ahead, the skies were freckled with contacts.
On the display, the great bay of Hangzhou gouged the coast, a square-cornered indentation, as if a chisel had been hammered into northern China. Shanghai lay north of the bay, Ningbo to the south. On the right of the display, the blue carets of friendly air were marching in, spread across a quarter of the screen.
He contemplated them with awe. Over two hundred attack aircraft, from Nimitz, Vinson, Reagan, Truman, and Stennis, preceded and accompanied by swarms of smaller UAVs. Combined strikes from five heavy carriers: the heaviest punch the U.S. Navy had
thrown at an enemy since World War II. After the UAV swarm and fighters swept enemy interceptors from the sky and suppressed the air defenses, the attack squadrons would unload. JDAMs and laser-guided bombs would obliterate oil refineries, power stations, container piers, oil-storage facilities, munitions dumps, bridges, handling cranes, and any ships that thought being in port meant they were safe.
To the northeast, smaller formations were approaching too, with callouts ranging tens of thousands of feet higher. Air Force bombers, nearing the end of a four-thousand-mile, seven-hour-long flight from Alaska. They’d doglegged across the North Pacific, then down the length of the Sea of Japan. They and the Navy would arrive over their targets simultaneously, bringing fifteen minutes of unadulterated inferno.
When they left, yet another wave of Tomahawks from the thirty destroyers and frigates steaming with the carrier strike force would launch. Scheduled to hit an hour after the main strikes ended, they would decimate firefighters, police, medical personnel, repair crews, and anyone else who exited shelter, dazed and concussed, thinking the attack was over.
By that evening, the Shanghai-Ningbo complex should no longer be able to support an invasion of any size, of anyone.
Closer in, wrapped tightly to his task force, fighters from Gambier Bay barriered him against air attacks, though the sortie rate was declining as the jeep carrier fell astern. So far they’d fought off three strikes of increasing intensity. None had broken through the tightly woven shield of fighters, data, and missiles Aegis held over the force. Two had come in from the air, with antiship missiles, and one had been a heavy wave of C-802s from batteries near their intended target, the Ningbo base complex. He’d been able to bat each down separately. The only damage had been loss of the second autonomous ASUV, which had gone silent in the middle of the battle. The final incursion had been by a submarine; but it had been swept off the board by a torpedo salvo from Montpelier.
So far, no surface forces had sortied from Hangzhou Bay. Had they been so severely attrited that none were left? Above the airfields, contacts swarmed like disturbed ground wasps. Yet oddly enough …
“They’re not coming out after us,” Staurulakis muttered through cracked pale lips.
“Just those air attacks. Which could have been heavier.”
“They must know we’re here … all the megawatts the radars are putting out.”
“Oh, they know.” He squinted up at the displays, wondering too.
He felt more exposed by the minute, here in the middle of the East China Sea. Intel doubted the PLA Rocket Force had many medium-range missiles left, after the hundreds they’d expended pounding Taiwan and Okinawa. If they’d managed to build more, or buy them from the Russians or their allies the Pakistanis, TF 76 would be a tempting target. But he had three jobs left: SAR, PIRAZ, and ABM. SAR: to linger as a ditching point for any crippled aircraft. PIRAZ: to “sanitize” the returning attack formations, identifying and shooting down any pursuers who tried to tail them back to the carriers. And ABM: screening those carriers, east of the strike force, from anything launched from the mainland.
Like the missile that had destroyed Roosevelt. He keyboarded an order pulling the formation in tight around the cruisers. If Zhang responded to the massive attack on the biggest port in China with another thermonuclear warhead, they’d have to cover the rest of the force.
With a sodden-sounding whunk, the vents popped open. The fans spooled up. Once again cool air breathed from the diffusers, fluttering the paper streamers someone had taped there. Chin propped on his knuckles, he sat immobile, gaze nailed to the flickering displays.
* * *
OVER the next half hour the blue clouds merged with the darting red fireflies above the offshore islands, then over Ningbo itself. He clicked from circuit to circuit, trying to glean some sense of how the battle was going, but jamming was heavy and transmissions were garbled. Every few seconds he checked the high-side chat. Any orders would come through there, not voice.
Loss and damage reports began arriving. The air controller, shadowing the transmissions among the pilots, reported several S-400 antiaircraft batteries still active. Each time a U.S. plane blinked off the screen, Dan glanced at Staurulakis. But she just nodded. Keeping her head down, typing, or squinting at the displays.
So far, the plan seemed to be working. TF 76 reached the southernmost limit of his box. He checked with Kristensen, the ASW coordinator, then brought the formation around to the reciprocal, headed northeast.
On the leftmost display now—the merged feed from the drones, from the other Aegis-capable ships, and from the carriers, behind them—the leading formations detached from the gaggle over the mainland and headed back out to sea. Some lagged their wingmen. Their callouts read slow and low. On the right-hand display, the narrow low-angle beam of Savo Island’s own radar, in ALIS mode, fingered the horizon of northern China. Its amber fanlike spokes clicked across hundreds of miles of jagged mountains. Terranova’s round face bent over the radar control console, while the Thai physicist hovered perched on a tall stool. But seconds, then minutes, ticked by without the staccato buzz of the launch warning.
He got up abruptly, too hinky to sit any longer, and paced the length of CIC beam to beam. He glanced back at Staurulakis’s bowed spine, wishing he could bring her a little reassurance.
But what could he say, other than that the best and most daring died first? Some comfort that would be.
He stopped at the electronic warfare console, where Donnie Wenck was riding the stack operators. Wenck said that what with the jamming from the ground, and the strike group’s own jamming from the air, he’d never seen tactical EW this heavy. “Put it on the speaker,” he told the operator.
The pulsating whine was like a hundred planing mills, buzzsaws, table saws, going at once. The chief said, “We’re freq-hopping as fast as we can. But they’re tracking every radar in the task force, wiping us out. They pitch us a couple low-cross-section incomers, it’s gonna get brown and lumpy real fast.”
Dan grinned unwillingly at the “brown and lumpy,” but just nodded. Jamming explained the freezing screens, the green snowstorms of corrupted data that sleeted the displays from time to time.
Next he stopped at the radar control console, and watched over Terranova’s shoulder. ALIS seemed to be punching through, its concentrated beam flicking back and forth, a windshield wiper scrubbing China clean. He patted the Terror’s shoulder. She looked back, one quick blank glance, then returned to her screen.
When he got back to the command desk, Mills cleared his throat. “Admiral. On high-side chat: Reagan’s detaching from the strike group. Moving closer, with their screen units.”
“Moving closer? Why?”
“No reason given. I suspect, to recover some of those damaged aircraft. Maybe to back us up as well.”
“We could have used more air cover on the way in,” he grumbled. But the closer the carriers edged, the more risk they incurred. Or was that the idea? To test the robustness of the remaining forces? Sucker them into a prepared kill zone?
But no one had mentioned a follow-on action. The plan had been to strike, recover, then retire. Not to hang around, giving the enemy time to generate a counterpunch.
Maybe he should clarify what was going on. At his terminal, he typed:
BARBARIAN: Interrogative movement RRR toward enemy coast.
RRR was Reagan. A few seconds elapsed. Then:
ENCAPSULATE: Confirmed.
“Encapsulate” was the strike group commander, hundreds of miles behind him on Truman. Okay, maybe his question hadn’t been clear. He typed
BARBARIAN: Do you require TF 76 to fall back on you?
ENCAPSULATE: Negative. Maintain station pending recovery all strikes. Further orders to follow.
“Okay, that’s clear enough,” Staurulakis observed.
A harrumph. Enzweiler, a laptop under his arm. “I’m available, Admiral, if you should need a relief.”
“I don’t … well … mayb
e for a couple of minutes. Thanks, Fred.” He could take a leak. And maybe wash his face. He brought the chief of staff up to speed, making sure Cheryl could hear what he was saying. Then let himself out, to use the little head across the p-way from Radio, thirty feet aft of CIC.
When he returned, Cheryl requested permission to come into the wind to launch Red Hawk. A fighter with a shredded wing had gone sinker en route back to Truman. The pilot had pulled the curtain twenty miles west of 76’s box. Too close to the coast, but he couldn’t leave the guy out there. Especially with Staurulakis’s gaze on him. “Okay,” he said. “But get Strafer off the deck fast as you can, Cheryl. Then return to formation course.”
He crossed to the air combat controller and got Gambier Bay’s SuCAPs vectored out to top cover Savo’s helicopter. That left the cruiser uncovered at low to medium altitude, but with the rest of the returning strike passing overhead, he felt fairly secure for the time being.
A fresh cup of coffee steamed at the command desk. He got half down before being distracted by Mills, who wanted to discuss repositioning Hampton Roads for better coverage. Dan called Soongapurn and Wenck in to join the discussion. After pulling up various programs, he typed the order on the command net. Shortly thereafter, the other cruiser pulled out to the north.
More agonizingly slow minutes inchwormed past. He glanced at his watch, startled to see it was midnight. Or was it noon? No, midnight. Another pill, from Doc Grissett? No more pills. Or maybe another hydrocodone for his fucking neck. How much longer were they going to leave him flapping out here, parading back and forth like a tin duck in a shooting gallery? You could only push your luck so far.
